Stackoverflow Is A Difficult Community to Participate In - <AUTHOR> http://theexceptioncatcher.com/blog/2012/09/stackoverflow-is-a-difficult-community-to-participate-in/#.UEu2l1DNwcU.hackernews <comment><USER4> One of the biggest problems I see on SO is repliers tell the OP they are "doing it wrong" and not answering the OP's question. Typically you'll see some smartass reply with, "Why would you want to do that? You're doing it wrong. Do it this way, here's how."

These replies infuriate me. The OP knows what his problem is and he's asking for an answer. He doesn't need a new problem to solve. He doesn't need to know what your opinion is about solving the problem. He needs a _solution._

One example: I was searching for how to solve a RVM and rails configuration problem on OS X. I typed the error message from the console into google, and found a SO question that was exactly the problem I was having. But instead of providing an answer, the most upvoted comment was to uninstall everything and use homebrew because "you're doing it wrong" without homebrew.

That's nice and all, but I've had a rails and rvm setup on my laptop for 2 years without homebrew, and, like the OP, I don't have time to set that up now. I just want to fix this one configuration error _and get back to work._ I quickly went back to Google and found the solution on another rails forum.

Granted, this is a problem with a lot of internet forums, not just SO. But it drives me nuts.

<comment><USER5> I like those type of answers. If you are encountering an issue doing something, and there is a better way of doing it (as opposed to just solving the problem in your current method), I think it adds a lot of value to offer those suggestions.

In your example, perhaps you didn't know about homebrew and this was going to save you a lot of time, well that's great. There can still be other answers that help your specific issue, but someone has thought outside the box and offered a completely different way of doing it.

For me the value of SO would be greatly reduced if people didn't do that.

<comment><USER6> Explaining a "better" way is great as an addendum to an answer for the actual problem asked. As you said, it can be very helpful to provide an out of the box solution.

However, it is very annoying when I ask a question and the only answers are some variant of, "you are doing it wrong." Multiple times I have had to write an explanation that is longer than my actual question to convince people that I actually do want an answer to the question I asked.

If you really think you understand my problem better than I do, based on a simplified explanation, awesome. I would love to hear a better way to go about what I am doing. But please, try to answer the actual question first (or at least say you don't know the answer). There is a slim chance the "better" way is not actually workable in the real world scenario.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's clear that SO adds a ton of value in general, and I've frequently found it useful when I'm working with a new and unfamiliar piece of technology and can't quite figure something out. I've found it to be sort of annoying as an answerer, though, and don't really hang out there looking for interesting questions to answer anymore.

The biggest problem is that some people treat it like a game of _Jeopardy_ , except with no penalty for incorrect answers. This is especially true when the questions are dealing with weird corner cases in languages or libraries - <USER2> often looks like there is an obvious answer, but it isn't always so simple.

I used to take the time to get the code running on my machine (if it was simple enough), figure out what was wrong, fix it, and then take the time to try to educate the person asking, rather than simply telling them what code to paste in to fix it.

This takes time, and in while I was working on it, you'd have someone come in, and blurt out some guess as to why it wasn't working, then edit their answer a bunch of times and maybe eventually get it right. I don't know why, but it always bothered me to see someone who guessed around (and maybe looked at better answers in the meantime) getting credit for really sloppy work.

I guess I don't know how you'd fix that, and it doesn't seem to be a big enough of a problem to keep the site from being useful, but it is still kind of annoying.

<comment><USER8> The incentive for quick sloppy answers comes from the bias of voters towards what's already upvoted, which could be fixed just by showing them the answers in random order without the scores. Maybe change the display mode after the page settles down some, by some measure like time passed, pageviews, or answer accepted.

I agree there's a problem, and used to participate anyway because more fun or interesting questions were getting asked early on; I never seem to see new ones when I peek in nowadays.

Added (heh): people also vote for sloppy answers just because they sound good. I don't know what to do about this -- perhaps you could try to estimate a voter's average vote quality, and weight them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't think these points are _particularly_ fatal, and they don't exactly make it hard per se to participate, just a little discouraging at times.

I take issue with his issue number one because I think the blame is placed on new people FAR too often online. The way new people are treated on pretty much every online community I've been a part of has been horrible, often downright pointlessly mean.

If we want SO askers to have good manners its our duty to explain our customs. When I answer a question from a new person I try to welcome them to SO or applaud their question (if novel), and if they worded it poorly I might answer what I think they meant and suggest better wordings to get help faster in the future.

Reputation is a bit of a sore point for a lot of people. I only hound two tags (canvas and html5) which are relatively unpopular, so my reputation will never be as great as someone who simply peruses the JavaScript tag and gives offhanded answers to very simple questions. A very detailed, analytical answer to a difficult problem in an unpopular tag will see one or zero upvotes compared to a flippant 5-second solution in a popular tag. This can be discouraging, and I'm not really sure if it needs fixing or not, or how it could be done.

I symapthize with the autor, but at the end of the day I choose to stay on SO in spite of all its woes because the gratitude of the answerers[1] alone is more than enough for me.

[1] <http://i.imgur.com/POZmt.png>

<comment><AUTHOR> I rarely ever get that thanks. On a decent % I don't even have it marked as an answer when it actually is.

I tend to go for the computer vision and finance questions since thats what interests me... but eh I can't participate due to those reasons anymore. I just don't care, and its not worth my time. I will however still use it to ask questions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have been finding SO much less useful recently (6 months). My primary background is in javascript and I occasionally pop on and look for questions to answer to help other folks out. However, I find most of the questions being asked not necessarily being questions, but more statements. Among the actual questions, they are more about this jquery plugin or that ASP.net thing. I wish that SO had better enforcement of _how_ questions are submitted, along with quality.

My other problem at the moment is that I am working on some objective-c stuff and SO is mostly useless for finding answers. Being new to the language and the APIs, I am sometimes lost and trying to get my bearings. A few questions I've submitted have either been closed or ignored. Only one really got a good answer, and when I tracked down the author I found he is very skilled and helps out lots of people. But there only seem to be a few people like him.

And by the way, if you're in SF and know objective-c, I'll buy you a couple beers in exchange for walking me through a couple things.

</comment><comment><USER11> Although I often feel stackoverflow is less useful than it used to be, without a doubt many of my google searches are answered immediately with a stackoverflow post at the top of the results, removing the need for me to ask a question in the first place. It's easy to discount how important SO still is to my developer learning workflow.

I'm finding I'm starting to go back to mailing list for niche programming topics (e.g., a specific framework or library) because nothing beats getting an answer from a top contributor or owner. Most people don't sit on StackOverflow all day waiting for questions, but they will respond to e-mails that pop up on their mailing list.

</comment><comment><USER12> This may touch on some points I've already addressed [1] but I have to say something.

I was a frequent contributor to StackOverflow [2] but have largely stopped for a number of reasons, the most important of which is I got a new job that took up much more of my time.

But another reason is that for me, as a (then) frequent answerer, it got a whole lot less _interesting_. This was due to two factors:

1\. A lot of the low-hanging fruit had been answered so the questions became increasingly esoteric such that you were less likely to simply know an answer and had to spend more time researching. That extra time meant you were also less _rewarded_ for the answer because less people were in a position to state that it was correct or not (if you consider karma a "reward"); and

2\. The ceaseless campaign against "interesting" questions due to increasing closure due to "subjective and argumentative" and the fragmentation of SO into the many StackExchange sites (causing a lot of questions to be migrated).

There are three basic errors that Joel has (and Jeff had) made (IMHO):

1\. Over-emphasis on editing.

In my mind there are three groups: askers, answerers and editors. Jeff & Joel made statements about editors are important and how editing is super- important, basically trying o elevate it to the same level as answering questions.

This is a problem.

Editors are the bureaucrats of the StackOverflow ecosystem. The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy [3]. The more editors you have the less each has to do. Rather than doing less, the kinds of people attracted to this kind of function prefer to simply _create_ work for themselves.

What's more, from Meta StackOverflow, from interacting from the people who edit a lot (and answer very little if anything), this simply reinforced my view: these are the kinds of people who destroy communities.

Those who can, answer. Those who can't, edit.

I've seen many spurious edits to many of my higher voted answers. Some capitalize something. Others come along and uncapitalize it. I've seen people come and add lines to my answers saying I stole it from someone else (seriously).

The net result is virtually any highly voted answer I have has been edited into community wiki oblivion. That creates a strong disincentive for me to spend time coming up with a good answer: I'll basically get limited credit from it and then have to watch as wanna-be editors essentially vandalize it.

The other thing these people do is close questions on the drop of a hat. They, as a group, tend to have an incredibly festidious nature when it comes to the enforcement of rules. They constantly seek some purer, higher standard and don't quite get that those rules are _guidelines_ that are a means to an end and not an end in themselves.

2\. "Subjective and argumentative".

Jeff and Joel from the outset wanted to prevent flame war type questions, the kind of questions that have no definite answer. Questions like "Is Ruby better than Python?" That's fine but it's been taken too far, in part by the very editors I previously mentioned.

Questions like "Should I use Angular.js or Ember.js for developing a CRUD-type Web application?" would be shut down in a minute. But the extra context matters. You can answer that question by giving a list of comparative advantages without being necessarily biased or inflammatory. That's actually interesting content, particularly if you're trying to decide between a number of new technologies, languages, etc. But alas SO seems keen on shutting that down; and

3\. Fragmentation.

There is another thread today about the difficulty of music classification [4]. The same goes for Q&A. Hierarchical classification schemes are too limited for Q&A. There are SO questions that have bounced around between a number of SE sites for this reason.

Just look at the Stack Exchange sites [5]. If I want to ask a question about being a programmer do I ask on OnStartups, on the Programmer SE or elsewhere?

The pragmatic answer is that there are some question that naturally fit on several sites. Yet the hierarchical pigeon-holing with esoteric and often subjective rules means it's harder to find content, it's hard to find where to place content and newbies inevitably get chastised for posting on the wrong site.

There is a reason tagging exists and is successful. Describe the traits of the question or, better yet, figure it out from the content, and show it when it's relevant to someone. Don't make me hunt across sites for it. That's a ridiculous solution.

I predict you'll see the rise of more tagging-oriented (at a higher level than say Java or C++) and automatic classification Q&A sites in the future.

With that out of my system, let me address som eof the points the OP specifically raised:

> The Eternal September Issue.

This one annoys me. And I don't mean new people. The negative reaction people have to them (eg [6]). When a community starts chastising newbies, that reflects badly on the community, not the newbies.

> Down voting as a means of closing a question.

The one part of downvoting I don't like is people use it as a means of saying "I disagree with this" (on purely subjective grounds), which is not the intended purpose. That problem seems to be nearly universal with voting systems (even here). The one good thing SO does is "charge" you for downvotes. That alone stops it being a huge problem (IMHO).

> This is another one of the odd cases on StackOverflow. A few of the "Exact > Duplicate" questions are not duplicates due to minor, but important, > differences.

True. The problem here again is that you have editors deciding to close things that they don't necessarily know anything about. The same problem infests Wikipedia (deleting articles on "notability" grounds).

> The value of reputation: After the global recalculation, the site's creators > made a bold statement that participation is not valued on the site.

I actually don't know what this is referring to but then again I've been largely inactive. There have been several recalculations though (eg question upvotes from 10 to 5 karma). I don't really have a problem with this. If you're too obsessed with your karma, you're focusing on the wrong things. And I like that the same rules apply to everyone (eg it's better than question upvotes before X are 10, after X are 5).

I worried when SO took VC money that they were going to turn something that is very successful in one segment and ruin it with attempts at making a general Q&A platform. 2+ years on I'm still failing to see traction in the SE sites beyond SO. This may yet still become a problem.

Perhaps the simplest answer here is that SO isn't a "community" as such. It went with the Q&A format (over, say, forums) to discourage discussion. People often criticized it for making discussion hard when that was kinda the point.

I certainly never went to SO to hang out. Some do I'm sure. The focus is (and should be IMHO) on the content not the community.

[1]: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4413684>

[2]: <http://stackoverflow.com/users/18393/cletus>

[3]: [http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/130452-the-bureaucracy-is- ex...](http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/130452-the-bureaucracy-is-expanding-to- meet-the-needs-of-the)

[4]: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4493959>

[5]: <http://stackexchange.com/sites>

[6]: [http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/9953/could-we- please...](http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/9953/could-we-please-be-a- bit-nicer-to-new-users)

<comment><USER13> It's pretty much guaranteed that any system with a privileged regulator (moderator, editor, whatever) class will bog down in the long run. The basic problem is that regulators get credit (however that gets measured in a particular community) when they regulate, not when they leave things alone or reduce the amount of regulation. Thus there's an incentive for regulation to increase even when it may not be needed, and indeed even when it is counterproductive.

There have been a couple of suggestions in science fiction that would be interesting to see someone try. Heinlein suggested a special branch of government whose purpose was to repeal laws and regulations promulgated by the other branches. Frank Herbert went to an even greater extreme, by having an quasi-official "Bureau of Sabotage".

Perhaps online communities should have a separate group charged with reversing the decisions of editors/moderators/whatever they're called, with no discussion or appeal permitted.

<comment><USER14> Thinking through the likely consequences of "volunteer bureaucrats" should send a shiver down the spine of anyone designing a crowdsourced resource. Even without a formal system of recognizing the work such people do, their own gratification inevitably rests on wielding the power they have.

So, yes, a system of meta-moderation, and preferably one that is mechanical and resistant to being gamed, is needed. As fascinating as it is to see emergent cultures in Wikipedia editing and reddit moderation, it ends up being dysfunctional, and that doesn't serve the goals of the communities from which those sites derive their value.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I get annoyed when I go looking for the answer to a particular technical question and find that the most precise related question has been closed as "too specific", whatever the hell that is. Well, yeah -- after questions about geometric methods and proper etiquette are answered, you get into more specific stuff.

I do the only thing I can. Upvote the question (which can still be done on closed questions), and tell the questioner it's good, and the moderator is being an ass. Which they usually are.

The kinds of questions that annoy me aren't "do my homework"; they're real questions that focus on specific issues that I'm encountering and wasting time on. Some brownie-point seeking moderator is engaged in exactly the type of behavior that other comments note.

</comment><comment><USER16> As a reader, I find SO quite useful. From the outside, however, the community appears particularly unwelcoming. For lack of a better term, it seems as though participants are walking on eggshells. Standards are enforced extremely rigorously, quite possibly to the detriment of the site as a whole.

I have not yet contributed, in no small part due to the above. I don't need SO karma to prove my knowledge in a given domain, and therefore my only reason to actively participate would be if I find it intrinsically rewarding - <USER3> does not currently appear to be the case.

<comment><USER17> "As a reader, I find SO quite useful."

"Standards are enforced extremely rigorously"

Do you see the link?

<comment><USER16> If you'll revisit my comment you'll note it was a statement regarding _my_ reasons for not participating on SO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > Down voting should be a way of saying, this is either wrong information, > misleading, or not helpful.

Many people claim that down-voting should only be used in very specific cases, but The Stack Overflow guideline seen while mousing over the down arrow is "This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful." I think that (especially the insufficient research part) is pretty broad.

<comment><AUTHOR> I argue about this with Shog9 [a newer mod] on meta. His response was that it should be dead on, completely right [despite hidden assumptions]. Even if it was correct [and maybe not related: lets say that someone is asking about how to opt c++ code, most advice will say to improve the design, but an answer on gcc opt flags is relivant just not exactly what was asked] it should be downvoted.

I called him out on that insanity, he was a big member on CodeProject, as was I. His excuse for that "codeproject turned in a shithole, lets not make this place like that" [not exactly what he said but it sums up many of his responses].

<comment><USER19> It would probably be relevant to mention that your conversations with Shog9 [1] [2] took place nearly three years ago, long before he was hired (he's a community coordinator, not a moderator).

[1]: <http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/29024/13531> [2]: <http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/36401/13531>

<comment><AUTHOR> Ahh! You found it. I could have sworn he was a mod then. Oh well, he had a rather large role at the time. [Not something easily obtained]

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I agree, it is tough. I have 8000 pts, have been on there for years, but most of my questions get seriously shat upon. It's pretty frustrating.

I can see why though, there are so many damn dumb questions, the moderators have to be sick of them by now.

It's a lot easier in the newer sites like DBA.

</comment><comment><USER21> I quit the site in July when I got 16 down votes (actually there were more) on my question because it got closed then I had the audacity to complain about it on Meta.

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11706028/creating-a- elisp...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11706028/creating-a-elisp- function-to-convert-url-to-html-link)

I think the "we will teach you a lesson when you disagree" attitude is pretty juvenile. It also seems like it's bad for business. People won't ask questions so there will be fewer search results directing people to the site.

<comment><USER17> The community expects folks posting questions to have done at least a tiny modicum of work before asking for help. You even admitted in the comments from back then that:

"@event_jr. Screw you. I'm looking for a quick elisp solution not your opinion. No one is doing my homework. I'm just getting a answer to something that I thought would be useful. Thanks correct. I don't want to put a lot of work into it. I have a Perl solution that'll do."

and

"I did zero, zippo. No work before asking."

So you know, you only had yourself to blame there.

<comment><USER21> I'm not debating the value of my question. Between two different accounts, I've asked over 150 questions since the beginning. You can have whatever rules you want. I disagreed and quit StackOverFlow. I'm not contributing to the site. I've been on the Internet for over 20 years. I know where and how to get answers.

At the moment, I'm pointing out the the juvenile "beat downs" that happen certainly don't make the site appealing to a certain group of people. I'm sure that I'm not the only person who has quit in frustration.

Btw, it's great that you found my deleted comments. Can you also include his snarky comment to which I'm responding?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Early on Stackoverflow was a great place, because you could ask any programming related question and you basically got a good answer or someone pointing you in the right direction quickly. Nowadays you first need to figure out where to ask. For some reason too granular classifications seem to be connected with programmer mindset. Also earlier lot of subjective and interesting questions were allowed, nowadays anything like that is closed quickly.

That said, nowadays I mostly browse ux.stackexchange which isn't as nitpicky yet.

</comment><comment><USER23> the most annoying thing, for me, is seeing obvious newbie questions closed as (inexact) duplicates of some other question, when it is patently clear that the questioner does _not_ have the ability to apply the other question and its answers to his problem.

<comment><USER9> Because of this the policy now is that some duplication is good[1]. Though a lot of users are still rabid about closing, I always try to answer inexact duplicates, and if the their title doesn't lead to duplicates, point out the things they _should_ have searched for (ie, object picking, hit testing and point in path are three names for very similar things)

[1] [http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/11/dr-strangedupe-or- how-...](http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/11/dr-strangedupe-or-how-i- learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-duplication/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Eh. I'm to the point where I see an attempt to "fix things" on their end ... I just hear "we're sorry its broke, heres a fix that should have been there a long time ago."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I was quite keen on SO at first, but have gotten much less so over the past year or two. The most recent incident that really put me off was a month or two ago when I found what I considered a pretty ideal SO question; ie. a "how to do X programmatically". Someone (a relatively new user) had already commented that it was a dupe of another question which it clearly wasn't; several of us simultaneously corrected him, and all seemed fine. Until a few hours later when some drive-by mod arbitrarily closed the question as a dupe; they obviously had enough ninja power to do that off their own bat, but it needed four or five of us to vote to reopen and the last I saw it'd only gotten to two or three. The original questioner seemed fairly demoralised by it; I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't come back.

I'm sure there are plenty of other cases of good moderation, but to me it highlights a serious problem with the site. One loose cannon (who I can only assume either was a badly written bot, didn't speak English, or was just trolling) and one overactive mod managed to ruin that question for everyone, and the rest of us had little power to really help.

I don't know what the answer to this is; it bears a lot of resemblance to Wikipedia, and they still struggle with it.

<comment><USER17> So someone closes one question and you decide that's it?

You know, there's a flag link under every post. If you thought a question was wrongly closed by the community or a mod then flag it and explain why. Nothing is irreversible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I was an active user once, but got tired and bored by the recent flood of 'questions' that are best answered by "Learn how to use a debugger" or "RTFM". I'm especially annoyed by people pasting a rather large chunk of code with a vague description of the problem and expect others to debug it for them.

I even have moderator privileges, but I don't have the time or desire to bother anymore...

I also started a discussion on meta-SO about "fix my code" questions with a concrete proposal [1], but didn't get anywhere. The most operational (and upvoted) answer/comment there was that the "close question" system was intended for this and that no other mechanism was needed. Well and nice, but maybe we'd then also need a filter that would filter-out questions with 2 or more votes to close. (You could still opt-in to see these questions, by they shouldn't be on the frontpage by default.)

[1] [http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/122951/sanction- user...](http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/122951/sanction-users- dumping-code-and-requesting-debugging)

</comment><comment><USER17> Maybe the author could back up these claims by citing specific cases for each of the complaints?

<comment><AUTHOR> Meh. Its an opinion that was formed from observation after a long period of time. I don't have the time to find individual instances, and I really don't want to dig through that site anymore.

Also: if I did mention support for each of the points whats stopping those examples from being edited, deleted, or someone from aruging "those are extreme cases"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> The real value of an SO answer is probably best approximated by how many people it helped. In my experience, SO is incredibly useful when I'm learning a new language or framework, and I want to quickly blast through hurdles caused by non-intuitive syntax or functionality. In those situations I'm on there almost constantly. For popular languages like Objective-C for iOS, there are thousands of people who are in that same situation.

Surely there must be a way to capture the value-added for all those thousands of people in the reputation system? Many people get to these answers from google, so it sounds like a simple matter of pinging them to (sign-in) and upvote the answer that helped them out.

If, on the other hand, as the author says SO is no longer actually values reputation, and is screwing with their algorithms accordingly, that is a serious problem. Not sure what can be done about that.

<comment><USER27> > Surely there must be a way to capture the value-added for all those > thousands of people in the reputation system? Many people get to these > answers from google, so it sounds like a simple matter of pinging them to > (sign-in) and upvote the answer that helped them out.

This happens if you're already logged-in and got to the site through a Google search (although only under certain circumstances—I think you have to have not visited SO in the past few hours/days?)

> If, on the other hand, as the author says SO is no longer actually values > reputation, and is screwing with their algorithms accordingly, that is a > serious problem. Not sure what can be done about that.

The only changes to the reputation system that I can think of are:

\- Making question upvotes worth +5 instead of +10 (March 2010: [http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/06/optimizing-for- pearls-...](http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/06/optimizing-for-pearls-not- sand/))

\- Making answers on downvotes free (June 2011: [http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/06/optimizing-for- pearls-...](http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/06/optimizing-for-pearls-not- sand/))

Beyond that, you can now gain rep from suggesting edits (+2, max +1000 from suggested edits or when you gain editing privileges), but that's not a change so much as an addition to the system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Slightly off topic, but am I the only person who cringes when people complain about duplicate posts?

Can't think of another issue where the angst is so disproportionate to the underlying problem.

I know, duplicate posts take up system resources, and we all remember when Technet and Usenet were DoSed by one too many duplicate posts (or did that not ever happen?). But duplicate posts also make common issues /usability problems more visible, and illustrate how terrible every forum's search is.

And besides, we've been trying to stop duplicate questions in tech forums since what, the first BBSes in the 70s? It hasn't worked, the fight is not worth fighting.

<comment><USER29> That's why duplicates on Stack Overflow usually aren't supposed to be deleted. They're supposed be _closed_ with a link to a canonical question, so that all answers are available in one place, but they'll remain open to help people who are searching.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I completely agree with the Eternal September point, or maybe it's just a problem of non-makers tearing down others instead of doing something more worthwhile.

I recently solved a tricky bug in some Java code that we eventually realized only happened after de/serialization upon server restart. Seeing no related questions on SO, I took the time to create a self-contained test case as part of a question[1] and also to answer that question with a solution that showed how to use reflection to set the value of final fields[2].

For my trouble, several SO members[3] trolled or ridiculed me. This doesn't exactly encourage future participation. My time is too important to waste it helping self-important, ungrateful jerks.

[1] [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12324472/a-transient- fina...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12324472/a-transient-final-field- used-as-a-lock-is-null)

[2] <http://stackoverflow.com/a/12324473/1237044>

[3] nicholas.hauschild trolled me for answering my own question (deleted by Anna Lear), and you can see EJB's discouraging comments.

<comment><USER17> It's a shame you had to experience that. Unfortunately, there are some folks who still haven't gotten the "it's ok to answer your own questions" memo [1].

But don't be discouraged. Ignore the trolls, flag for mod attention and we'll sort out crap like that.

[1] [http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/05/encyclopedia-stack- exc...](http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/05/encyclopedia-stack-exchange/)

<comment><USER21> Hi teh_klev, M-x here again... I always added my own answers if no one else came up with a good one. e.g.

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9272244/uisplitviewcontro...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9272244/uisplitviewcontroller- on-ipad-with-storyboards)

Personally, I think StackOverFlow isn't worth the effort. What people there don't get is that what's really important is simply getting great questions and great answers. That's it. Period!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> All I know that whenever I needed a help, the SO community generously came forward and helped me. Thanks Joel and His Team

</comment><comment><USER32> I find it weird that people use Stackoverflow as a community where they hang out and spend time. The obvious way to use Stackoverflow is when you're having trouble figuring something out you get there via google. While doing your research you might come accross an unanswered question that you know the answer to so you write it up. That's it. It's a very useful site but there's no need to get emotionally involved with the reputation score.

As far as using the score to get a job, I don't buy it. If you're actually good at some topic you will be able to get a job regardless. If I was hiring someone who was pushing their super-high Stackoverflow score I would be suspicious why they spent so much time gaming a dumb score on a website instead of building cool stuff.

<comment><USER17> No-one has ever suggested that SO rep alone should be used solely to judge someone's skills when hiring. Then neither would the contents of your github or bitbucket repo (after all how do you prove that the code in the repo is yours?).

SO rep is just another small nugget of information that _may_ be useful to potential employers, and if said employer is using the SO careers site, your Careers profile is linked to your SO profile page.

I mention in my "other activities" section of my CV that I participate in the site, but I certainly don't make a big deal about it, and especially the rep part.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> For me the reason it's difficult to participate in is completely different. I originally signed up with my own OpenId server run on a static IP address from my basement rack. When we switched ISP's, we went with a normal account and moved most of our servers to Linode. I didn't bother moving the OpenID server (I'd forgotten about it) but about 7 months later, I lost the cookie for SO and that ended my ability to log in.

I have to contradict the article's assertion that karma's were dropped by the rebalancing ... I've been amazed at how my better answers have continued to receive up-votes and I think my reputation is about 1000 points higher than it was when I last participated.

</comment><comment><USER34> As apparently the lone voice of dissent, I like to say that I find the StackOverflow moderation to be helpful and increase the quality of the site. I suppose it's not a coincidence but I don't find it difficult to participate at all.

</comment><comment><USER35> Lots of people don't accept answers that are correct, even if we've had subsequent discussion and elaboration of the answer :( I have a few open answers telling people exactly how to do things, and they've thanked me for my answer (and in one case I won a bounty) but my answer is STILL not accepted.

</comment><comment><USER36> I like the posts that are just a stack trace of an NPE in a homework assignment.

<comment><AUTHOR> Don't forget the stack traces of an exception in either Spring or Hibernate.</comment></comment>


State of the web: Flash vs HTML5 - <AUTHOR> http://www.piehead.com/blog/2012/01/flash-vs-html5

<comment><USER2> 2012 is the year of the tablet: Android, iPad, and Win8. It doesn't matter what Flash does better than HTML5 or that browser support is still an issue. If you are building today and you want your content to display on mobile, then you can't use Flash.

<comment><USER3> While I'm sure that the tablet is the future of personal computing, I don't think this is the 'year of the tablet'. If that were true then the next 5 years will be the year of the tablet. The first true evidence of the change is when college students are buying them instead of laptops at a significant rate.

I do believe that any programmer should be using standards but there are still questions when it comes to video.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Though I've always been annoyed by Flash, during the Apple/Android/Flash brouhaha I was sure that Jobs was making a mistake by shunning it. I was wrong.

It's a year or two later now and nothing stirs disappointment quite like the realization that that giant, black, unresponsive rectangle on a website is Flash bringing the Android browser to its knees. I have never seen a game that successfully used Flash on the browser. There is nothing more detrimental to the web browsing experience on Android than running across a page with Flash content.

<comment><USER5> Check out kongregate.com. The fact of the matter is that Flash is an amazing tool if you are small team making video games. I don't see HTML5 as being on the same level yet. The only reason Flash is falling out of favor is because it sucks on mobile devices. Well, there are still millions of desktops with mice out there that are not going away any time soon.

<comment><USER4> Yes. Flash on Windows isn't half bad, but Flash on Android is the eighth plague.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm always curious to see what these statistics would look like if they were broken up by user demographics. And also by HTML5 feature.

Sure, 1/4 of users might experience problems with HTML5. But what really matters is what percentage of _your target market_ will experience issues with the HTML5 _that you use on your site._

Conversely, if you're targeting smartphone users then you should probably be developing a mobile version of your site anyway. And if you are doing that, then having Flash on your main site won't create such a problem with reaching mobile users. Not that it doesn't get rid of the need to make sure your site degrades gracefully.

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't know where the '26% experience issues with html5' figure comes from. Based on the colors it accounts for IE<9, but the numbers show 19%+5%+4% for IE<9 (which does not == 26%), of which many HTML5 features can either degrade nicely or be polyfilled, at least for IE8, so you could argue about inclusion of that 19%.

Also, define 'wealth of capabilities', opposed to 'does not currently have some Flash features', as the reverse can also be said just as easily.

As for 3D, WebGL looks capable enough to me (but that may be because I already know OpenGL)

</comment><comment><USER8> we need a way that we can vote against InfoGraphicsChartJunk

</comment><comment><USER9> Why would you compress these in JPG :(</comment>


The power of the command-line as a programming environment - <AUTHOR> http://pindexis.github.io/command-line/2015/12/23/power-of-commmand-line.html <comment><USER2> My IDE is full screen emacs, with one emacs window running a shell for when I just want a command line. This works great on MacOSX and on Linux. It gives me integrated debugging, code navigation (with cscope-mode), code completion, git support and more. The downside is the steep learning curve, but I climbed that years ago and haven't looked back.

<comment><USER3> I have the same configuration... the only drawback is that its very difficult to do any real work on Java with emacs...

<comment><USER4> I'm guessing the main problem is the vast list of identifiers that you need to think about?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> OK, wonderful. What text editor do you use in this environment? vim? emacs? ed? Where do you run your command line? A command line can run in a dedicated terminal emulator, or it can run...inside of an IDE, or inside of emacs, or tmux. How do you do compile/edit cycles--vim quickfix? Just run the compiler in a separate window and manually move to each error?

The post mentions composition, extensibility, and keyboard instead of mouse. Many IDEs can do that. Certainly emacs can. Then it says that the UNIX way has "consistency." If that were true I wouldn't spend so much time reading the bash man page when I'm trying to figure out all the ${parameter:?expansion} options.

This is not really a specific post. It's your usual paean to old-school UNIX but it does not say what it really means to use "the command-line as a programming environment".

<comment><USER6> Heh. I am one of those old-school UNIX people, and this post does little for me. It's really just somebody's thoughts out loud.

It's also their first and only blog post on his blog which, now that I look at it, he calls "My random thoughts."

Hmmm. I'm wondering how this got upvoted...

Reading a little bit more about the person on their about page: "I was relatively successful,creating and managing over 10 websites on a dedicated server generating around 5000 users/day at peek time. Along the way, I've created a couple of softwares to promote websites, scrape data, post content, break captchas etc…"

I am wondering if this was just a hack?

</comment></comment><comment> three-cups I would love to see more projects embrace this method of development as a lowest-common-denominator. I'd be great to be able to download a library and build it using the least number of tools. For a Java project, this might just be javac. The project could include build descriptors for ant, maven, etc. as well as IDE config.

It feels like half the time I download a Java/Maven project, there is some issue with the build that I have to spend time debugging. I'm not familiar with Maven, and Maven is pretty complicated, so this is a pain.

<comment><USER7> > It feels like half the time I download a Java/Maven project, there is some > issue with the build that I have to spend time debugging. I'm not familiar > with Maven, and Maven is pretty complicated, so this is a pain.

Maven actually simplifies a lot and luckily has been kind of the standard on Java for the last few years.

For simple projects, as long as you have a working jvm and mvn on the path it is just a matter of mvn build. Also IDEs, at least IntelliJ and NetBeans tends to understand pom natively.

For more complicated projects my gut feeling is they would have been even more complicated without maven.

<comment> three-cups It may be standard for Java, but I wouldn't say it's simple. I'll give you an example.

Say I want to use protobufs. There are a couple prerequisites: 1) I have to know the protobuf syntax. 2) I have to know how to compile the protobuf file into my language of choice.

If you're using maven, you also have to know which plugin to use (a simple google search), and add the 30 lines of XML to your build file. This is not such a big deal, except you're also hoping that the plugin supports all the protoc features that you may need. And what versions of protoc does the plugin work with? And is the plugin well documented?

Compare this to using make, or even using the <exec> ant task. protoc is well documented and you can access all the features you want in a standard way (command line options and arguments).

<comment><USER7> Aren't you oversimplifying a bit on the non-maven side?

Last I checked when I use make I still have to find and download all dependencies before I can get a working build.

Maven sorts all that.

<comment> three-cups Fair point. But I'd say the dependency management in maven is actually more of a hassle than it's worth. For me, I understand jars in a lib directory well enough. Dependency management can become complicated pretty fast (e.g. version resolution).

<comment><USER8> You still need version resolution for jars in a lib directory, whether Maven does it or you do it.

Maven just automates the process.

<comment> three-cups I guess I never found manual dependency resolution to be that big of a problem.

<comment><USER8> I've never found automatic dependency resolution to be that big of a problem.

But if I had, I'm sure that manual resolution wouldn't have been any easier or more maintainable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I find that after I discovered tmux, I was able to use the command line full- time much more easily. Now everything I do is command-line-unix-ey, from my coding (with Emacs) to my web browser (Elinks).

It's kind of a pain in the butt to learn, but I feel that it helps me stay focused on my work; there are a lot less distractions in the command-line world.

<comment><USER10> I like the idea of text-mode browsing, but I find the translation of CSS causes practical problems whether its elinks link lynx etc. For example, Hacker News nested comments are displayed as being on one level. There is a hack to fix this, but per-site hacks is not a usable way to browse the web.

<comment><USER11> > For example, Hacker News nested comments are displayed as being on one > level.

I think that this is because syntactically they _are_ on the same level. Assuming I'm reading the source correctly, they're all cells in a table, at the same level, rather than being nested.

So elinks et al. are correct; the site is using CSS to indicate something not in the structure.

<comment><USER12> What would be the correct way to structure something like this in pure HTML?

<comment><USER13> Ordered and unordered lists (

) were pretty much intended for this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Neal Stephenson's "In the Beginning was the Command Line" is a more in depth take on this topic: [http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html](http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html)

<comment><USER15> According to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_Co...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_Command_Line)

In a Slashdot interview in 2004, in response to the question:

... have you embraced the new UNIX based MacOS X as the OS you want to use when you "Just want to go to Disneyland"?

he replied: I embraced OS X as soon as it was available and have never looked back. So a lot of In the Beginning...was the Command Line is now obsolete. I keep meaning to update it, but if I'm honest with myself, I have to say this is unlikely.

<comment><USER11> > I embraced OS X as soon as it was available and have never looked back.

I used the original Mac OS from 1984-2000. I've used Windows since before 1995 until earlier this year. I've used Linux since 1998. I've used Mac OS X every once in awhile when using other folks' computers.

I honestly don't know why someone who's comfortable on the command line (and doesn't need certain proprietary desktop-publishing programs) would use Mac OS X (or Windows). It doesn't give me a decent window manager. It doesn't let me keep my hands on my keyboard (right now, my mouse is almost two feet from my hand, and yet I'm completely happy and able to get around as I need). It doesn't use screen space very well. It's not free. Where having the menubar atop the screen was a good design decision in 1984 with a monitor a few inches tall, it's a horrible choice on a modern large screen: I spend so much time moving the mouse that I spend very little time actually _using_ the computer, rather than moving-and-reading. It certainly doesn't feel like a well- designed, well-integrated whole: it feels like a colossal heap of mystery meat navigation, where nothing is obvious or intuitive, things bounce and slide for no apparent reason and I can't just get my work done.

I get that for certain desktop publishing tasks it's superior, and that if one wants proprietary software then it's a friendlier alternative to Windows (which is the obvious best choice if one wants proprietary software support). But other than that, why pay extra for a Mac? A modern Linux has terminals, web browsers and editors; sound and graphics are not the pain they were in the 90s; what else does one need than a command line, a web browser, a decent editor and some music?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Now why the command-line is not the main choice among developers?"

It depends who you speak to. Where I work, almost everybody uses the command line.

<comment><USER17> And people using IDEs sometimes use the command line even if they think they are not. Example: a team I trained to Ruby on Rails recently was using Ruby Mine, an IDE for Ruby. Nearly all the advanced stuff (rake this, rake that) involved looking for some menu entry and typing in the rake arguments. If they had an open terminal in the project directory they'd get those tasks done much quickly. Obviously they resisted the idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The exec system call in Unix has an argument named argv which is an array of strings. Each of these strings has traditionally been called a command-line argument. Also, when the user of a Unix shell hits the return key, a string or line of text is submitted to the shell for interpretation, and that string used to be called a command line.

For those writers who insist on using the term "command line" to mean avoiding pointing devices and doing everything through a terminal-emulation application, please tell me what term I should switch to to refer to the elements of argv or to refer to a string submitted to a Unix shell. I want a term that does not through endless repetition on HN and other forums leave the reader with the impression that the terminal-emulation app (or the Linux console) is my preferred interface to my computer.

Suppose for example that TextMate or Atom on OS X or Linux is my preferred programming environment and that from my preferred programming environment, I frequently run programs like grep, dict and ping -- with the output from those programs collected by and presented to the user by a TextMate or Atom extension. grep, dict and ping adhere to certain conventions, such as flags or switches that start with a hyphen, and the convention of writing ordinary output to a file descriptor named stdout while writing notifications of abnormal conditions to stderr. What term should I use to refer to those conventions?

<comment><USER19> The difference between a Command-Line Interface (argv-based) and a Textual User Interface (e.g. ncurses or fdisk-style interactive) is very important; the latter generally just means "a very bad but low-bandwidth GUI with no mouse support", but the former implies several attributes that allow for automation and programability: the course of interaction with a program (its command-line invocation) becomes an object trivially manipulable in its own right by users and programs.

We need to improve from the command-line by enabling even more expressive operations on programs invocations: programs should cooperate to enable perfect completion in a way that doesn't require writing custom completion scripts for every (shell, tool) combination, and they could describe their input and output formats to allow the shell to do "program search" in the space of command-lines. Given fairly rough user input, the shell can help guide the user to where they were trying to go with less work. Computers should be using some CPU time to actually help us figure out what we're trying to do, instead of everyone still hunting down syntax errors and reading man pages like it's the 1980's.

<comment><USER20> When it comes to a textual user interface, have you considered Rob Pike's Acme?

[http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/acme/](http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/acme/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> wait this isn't how everyone programs?</comment>


Ask HN: Do you have any repeating tasks that can be automated? - <AUTHOR> Do you have any computer related repeating tasks that can be (or already are) automated with software either fully or partially? <comment><USER2> Yes, of course.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you please tell me what exactly?

<comment><USER2> What do you need to know, exactly? What do you need it for? It's too vague question to answer concretely.

<comment><AUTHOR> Anything you could either do manually or write a bash/python/javascript/php/whatever script for, or use a SaaS.

It can be anything, like scraping some site and exporting the data as csv, getting raw text from pdf, doc files etc.

Do you use something like this, or do something that can be automated this way? Just give some examples that first come to mind.

<comment><USER2> Monitoring. Managing servers' configuration. Building packages to install on servers. Building reports.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Working remotely, coworking spaces, and mental health - <AUTHOR> https://bitquabit.com/post/working-remotely-coworking-and-mental-health/ <comment><USER2> For the last 2.5 years I've been working at DigitalOcean as a remote employee. DO has more than 50% of the staff remote. I think it's important that a large chunk of a company & team be remote, to be successful in the exercise, so that there be a forcing function to use asynchronous communications. It's been really life changing for me.

We have a bunch of style of remotees; work from home, work from coffeeshop, work from coworking spaces and work from a new place every day.

I've tried all of these styles, starting with work from home, then getting super depressive from loneliness and getting a coworking space (DO pays for it), then realizing I didn't use it and instead working from a mix of home, coffeeshop, and random visits I pay to my friends. And now I've been switching to mostly working from the crazyest settings I can think of. I worked from camping spots, from a sailboat, in a national park, on a beach in Asia, and it all works out once you're used to "travelling from anywhere".

I'm having the best time of my life by experimenting with what it really means when your ability to feed is now decoupled from your physical location. I feel like I'm living in a future that maybe more of the people will have the chance to live soon, and that it's my duty to find a "Theory of Working In The Future". My first theorem is "Don't stay home everyday else you shall go crazy".

Also, think about the implications of OneWeb and the constellation that SpaceX has been working on; I'm thinking "what if I could get low latency/high bandwidth internet from the middle of any ocean"? The future looks bright.

[edit]: just realized I'm kind of praising my employer a lot here. My comment isn't meant as recruiting spam, tho I think DO's great to remote folks. Also we're building massive distributed systems everyday and it's fun. So uh... check this out? [http://grnh.se/wv3fgo](http://grnh.se/wv3fgo)

<comment><USER3> > then getting super depressive from loneliness

I read this so often and can't understand it. It's like most people never get friends outside of work. Like they never grew up and are still in the 'I can only get friends at my school/class'-mindset from when they were young.

The best people I know I met at places of my choosing, not at work, not at school.

I work remote because my private life is so demanding and I couldn't get it work with 40h in an office.

<comment><USER4> > like most people never get friends outside of work.

60 hour weeks and a young family will do that. I literally don't have a single friend outside of family members. I'm also suffering from bipolar depression but it's either support my family or be happy. I'd rather they be happy. I guess.

<comment><USER5> > 60 hour weeks

There's your first problem. Stop overworking.

<comment><USER6> Maybe. But then it's not that simple for everyone to break out of such a vicious cycle and find friends when you don't have friends to help already.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As a remote worker, I would really enjoy a coworking space at least 1-2 times per week, but the hour commute and the expense just are not worth it for me. I've been working remotely for two years and absolutely go stir crazy, and even into fits of depression, when I'm not really pro-active about getting out.

I've been volunteering with a community theatre this year, which gets me out of the house after work most week days. My mood goes up about 10x when I do this. During the month or so downtime between plays though, things start going bad again.

I'm also involved with some other meetups/clubs and do piano lessons. Putting together a deliberate schedule of "outside activities", at least for me, is absolutely necessary to make it work.

And I would still never go back to working in an office!

<comment><USER8> I am in the same situation. People tell me all the time how lucky I am to work remotely, and I was excited when it started. But it definitely has some drawbacks that I didn't expect, especially in the mental health department.

Webex/Hangouts/GTM is fine for 90% of the banal, communication meetings. But it really fails for any design meetings that need a whiteboard. I have tried getting my team to use some alternatives, but there is always some eye rolling, and it never sticks around. It doesn't help that the majority of our team is onsite, so any alternative is 100% for my benefit. Also I haven't found an app that can compete with the tactile feeling of a physical board.

Also I feel like I miss out on the "water cooler" talk. Any sort of communication I have is very formal. My team doesn't like using chat casually, so it really hampers my ability to form relationships with them.

Finally, time management is an issue. When you have an office, its much easier to turn on and off. When I am at home too many mornings start late, and too many evenings run long.

<comment><USER9> I think the surface hubs may change that - the experience is _almost_ better than a real whiteboard. They are hilariously expensive though.

<comment><USER10> I don't think it's a problem that can be solved by more technology.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Overall a well written article with some valid criticisms. After 2 years working remotely I observed roughly the same facts, but have a slightly different spin on the whole thing.

Like everything in life, working remotely has tradeoffs. One person's pro is someone else's con.

Pro: I potentially gained hours of my life back every day. I know many people who work for similar companies who spend more than an hour commuting every day. They take less-desirable jobs and leave behind their coworkers just so they can get an hour of their life back and reduce their commute from 2+ hrs to 30 minutes.

Pro: I can disassociate my COL from the company's choice of office location.

Pro: I can cook food in the crock pot on a regular basis without worrying about my house burning down.

Pro: I can walk my dogs during my lunch break (or pick up food from the grocery store or run some other errand).

Pro: (subjective) My coworkers competence is higher than what I typically observe from companies that limit their hiring pool to people who live within a few minutes (or hours) of one office building.

Pro: I can and have worked from a hammock, a camper van in a state park, a car on a road trip, and a cafe in Paris.

Pro: No requirement to waste literally hours of my day in bullshit pre-lunch planning, post-lunch coffee, etc. When I'm onsite I'm happy to spend lots of time on watercooler talk, but I'm not obligated to do it every work day.

Pro: I can go hiking on my lunch break.

Con: I don't see anyone but my spouse. I have to go to additional meetups in order to make up for this.

Con: Not as much face time with execs. This can matter politically and for your career.

<comment><USER12> My list is pretty much the same—for an introvert who values deeper relationships with fewer people, the cons aren't too bad. And being a meetup organizer for two different meetup groups means I'm forced (a good thing for an introvert) to see other people in the area who work in the same area.

I've been working 100% remote for 5 of the past 10 years, and part-time remote the other 5, and in none of this time have I gone stir-crazy or felt depressed about my work... some people are able to thrive in a remote/isolated environment (I still do video calls 2-4x a day for different projects, so it's not like total isolation), while others really need a group of people working with/around them to thrive.

It also helps to have a family or more than one other person living in your residence if you choose to remote work from home—it forces you to have face- to-face human interaction (to the extent you choose to put down smartphones, laptops, etc. outside of work hours).

<comment><USER11> > And being a meetup organizer for two different meetup groups means I'm > forced (a good thing for an introvert) to see other people in the area who > work in the same area.

Funny you should mention that. I'm a co-organizer of a pretty active meetup. The first tuesday of the month is the highlight of my social calendar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Working remotely killed my mental health. Even with Slack, Hangouts, and all the rest, I became lonely, had difficulty focusing on work, and generally became significantly less happy and productive. I tried a coworking space, and while I made some great friends there, it still wasn't doing it for me.

I've been back at an office job for about 3 months now and it's been a huge improvement. I love being in an office with a team of people all working on the same thing, solving problems together, and socializing.

Obviously, different things work for different people, but I wish I hadn't bought into the remote work idea as wholeheartedly as I did. It's important to be aware of what you get out of onsite work in addition to the drawbacks.

</comment><comment><USER14> As someone who spent the better part of the last decade working remotely, and having read tens of rants about open office floor plans with which I agree 100%, I think that the problem here is that there is no Silver Bullet. Those of us who prefer a results only work environment will never thrive in an open office, and those of us who need human contact will not thrive in a results only work environment.

More likely if you're reading this, you're somewhere between those two extremes. I'm an introvert when I need to get things done, but I'm an extrovert everywhere else. I have seen just as many people crash and burn trying to motivate themselves while working remotely as I have seen people go quietly nuts in an open office.

I am going to be working from a co-working space in the near future, but I suspect that I will still need to spend significant amounts of time on my own in my home office if I want to stay productive. I don't expect that solution to work for anyone else, but after nearly two decades in the software industry, I know what works for me.

<comment><USER15> I like traveling, so working remotely from Australia for a couple of months, then switching things up in Japan for a while works well for me. I haven't been able to do that for a few years though, since my current employer likes to see everyone in the office at least once a week.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wouldn't consider myself an extreme introvert but I am 100% satisfied working from home (been doing it for 4.5 years now).

The author mentions socialization only in real life. What about online socialization? I still talk to 2 of my best friends in a chat room (used to be IRC, now we use Slack). I keep up with old friends on Facebook. I have discussions and arguments on HN and Reddit.

And probably most importantly, my remote company has a VOIP chat that everyone is on and we routinely have "water cooler" type convos, in addition to serious stuff.

So yeah, I think you can solve this problem without needing real life interactions. Embrace your digital life to the extreme! And, companies hiring remote workers need to support them better, with VOIP and text chat rooms that they can be in (with other employees) and feel like they're part of the team and not just a worker.

<comment><USER17> i'd consider myself pretty introvert and have been working remotely for 5-6 years and only realised on how much i missed out socially after getting a regular job at a startup again. I just enjoy working in a team of motivated people, talking to them randomly about non-work/non-tech stuff. I still feel more productive even though there are more interruptions, but at home i tended to create these interruptions myself and was never really satisfied with my productivity either.

Online socialization interactions/chats (even video) with friends/team members never gave me the same kind of feelings, and i still felt more lonely. I guess there is something about face to face that I like.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, I'm curious how I would feel if I went back to a normal job. Before working remotely I worked in the game industry for 10 years and I mostly loved it. But, I also really like my current remote setup.

I think a big part of it is that I started working remotely at the same time as I had kids, so now I can take off any time I want to spend time with them. I normally take a 2 hour break for eating dinner and helping with bedtime, then I'm back to work. I remember people from my office job who would say that they only see their kids for 10 minutes a day or something like that. I didn't think anything of it at the time, but now that I have kids of my own with my current setup, I can't imagine only seeing them for 10 minutes a day. That just doesn't seem right.

<comment><USER18> > I didn't think anything of it at the time, but now that I have kids of my > own with my current setup, I can't imagine only seeing them for 10 minutes a > day. That just doesn't seem right.

This may be viewed as a benefit rather than a downside by a surprisingly large number of people.

I'm not passing judgment here, just speaking empirically. For men especially, the office and work are the default place to hide from unhappy marriages, dull domestic life, housework, and [perceived as] perfunctory obligations that they want to avoid (due to lack of interest) but which it is not socially acceptable, or perhaps politically correct, to reject. Not everyone is in a happy marriage, and not everyone actually enjoys spending time with their wife. Furthermore, not all fathers have the right combination of personality, emotional constitution and intellectual disposition to have fruitful interactions with all kids, at all ages, and all times. "I love spending time with my kids more than anything else in the world!" is an obligatory refrain nowadays, so few people will admit otherwise—even to themselves—because it's very non-comme il faut. But the truth is that 2 1/2 year-olds can be pretty unstimulating company. For a lot of busy, career-minded, highly accomplished, worldly people, ten minutes before bedtime sounds about right. That sounds cruel and terrible now to a lot of people now, but would have been quite uncontroversial half a century ago.

That has been one of the most important functions of the organisation office in the 20th century. It's a cover that gets many men—often fairly inscrutably—out of having to deal with things they don't really want to deal with. Feminism picked up on this a long time ago, and that's what's behind a lot of the "second shift" double standard critique. The charge is that men still have an easier time cloaking themselves in inscrutability when they attend to their careers. In this version of events, nobody really has a right to question why they're at the office so much, what they do there, or why they're working so hard.

I'm not talking about men that lie that they are "at the office" when they're in fact at the hotel with their mistress. I'm talking about men that are legitimately ambitious and interested enough in their work that they take on more of it—a lot more of it—than they absolutely have to willingly, because they are secretly not so interested in achieving "work-life balance", as other aspects of their life are not fulfilling to them. There's a lot you can get out of if you have to stay late at the office all the time due to meet a legitimately ambitious shipping schedule. Hard to argue with.

Another, related problem is that most non-digiratti don't really understand computer-based self employment. I'm sure we have all dealt with the problem of older relatives, more traditionally-minded people, or unenlightened spouses perceiving that we are simply sitting on the couch "playing on the computer", much as many of us have always done since childhood. In the mind of such people—a vast segment of American society—work is a place one goes, with a briefcase, and which keeps defined business hours. Intellectually, they understand that the money comes from somewhere, and that you are not actually paid to "play on the computer". But instinctively, they can't process that. The appearance of "playing on the computer" means you don't really do much of anything and are always available to chat, run errands, walk the dog, feed the baby, etc.

Some will say, "But that's why I have a house, with a door that closes, and everyone around me knows not to ever bother me when I'm in there!" Yeah, okay. My experience hasn't been that this works. The first time your wife walks in there anyway and sees you browsing Reddit instead of feverishly parrying phone calls and struggling to right critical infrastructure to prevent impending apocalypse, that's done. From that point onward, you're just hiding in there to play on your computer and are preemptible by processes with nominally high priority. :-)

That's another class of problem that going to an office solves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Coworking spaces are a mixed bag. I went there for few months but stopped again.

Good is that you face more serendipity than when working from home. But really, it is not that much more. After only few weeks, the novelty wore off and I got bored and saw more the downsides. Like super small tables, no dual monitor setup, always too cold, the commute, less free fruit, and the people. Some are quite nice and you realize that you need random social encounters but there are also the typical odd people to whom you cannot relate at all (like everywhere). Those people don't hurt but I remember one who reserved the best flexdesk the night before by leaving tons of her post-its and other papers there. No big deal but nobody who makes you happy either.

I knew most people I met there before. Bonding with new people without having a common mission was not easy, it just didn't feel natural (and I am rather the extrovert sales type of guy). So, you can still feel 'alone' in a coworking space.

I think a coworking space makes more sense if you need a space as a team and want or need to see each other f2f on a regular base.

For business meetings or doing interviews, I prefer lobbies of top hotels, they are even more representative than the best coworking spaces and at the end of the month also cheaper with full service included and no extra fee when booking some meeting room. And for two hours working away from home, I am a fan of Starbucks or any coffee ahop with good wifi.

<comment><USER20> I've worked in a number of co-working spaces and what I've seen is a huge inconsistency in spaces. (which is to be expected.)

Some have internet that is flakey or slows down on crowded days. Some are just too loud. Some are just too hot or cold. Some have bad locations. Or have horrible chairs and desks. The list goes on and on. Seems like you have to find the one that is just right. Even still, don't go there every day. Mix it up by working from there, home, cafe's, etc.

I've realized I'm very picky about my work environment...

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> > If you're thinking of working remote, then think about what kind of working > environment you're happiest with before you take the job, and make sure > you'll have that environment available to you.

Seems to me that the best part of remote working is the ability to figure out what the best environment is for you. Don't be a theorist, be an experimentalist: try a bunch of different situations and see what you like best. It sounds like the author started down this path, but stopped too soon (at first).

> Are you sad when a lot of your office is out sick, or are you relieved?

Usually relieved, then I wonder why I bothered with an hour of driving to sit in the office by myself, when I could have done that from home.

> Do you get uncomfortable when you're in quiet environments for too long, or > do you revel in them?

Love quiet! My office at work has no windows (not even internal ones); being able to close the door and cut off the outside world is the best!

> Do you feel weirdly lonely when you're in a noisy coffee shop, or do you > feel energized?

Annoyed by the noise mostly. Coffee shops are for getting coffee and getting out. Libraries are way better for actual work, IMO.

<comment><USER22> > Usually relieved

I think almost everybody will have the same answer here. I don't think it's a good question, because most people have too much interaction every day and is tired of it. That does not mean they will be happy standing most of their days alone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> 5 years remote. Personal bottom line:

\-- negative: lost interest in having friends (and generally the patience needed to talk to people), no social life, no career, work-life balance completely broken

\-- positive: sleeping 8 hours a night! (and more if I need to), making walks in the park/training at noon, never really sick, comfortable home office, can be efficient again (only my job doesn't require that). Started having ideas again and thinking about side projects.

Before going remote, during 15 years I was commuting 2+ hours in the morning (so 2 hours again in the evening), sleeping 4 hours a night by the end of the week, dozing off the entire weekend and generally feeling extremely exhausted, mentally and physically, easily catching flu etc.

Would I move back to office employment? I really hope I won't have to.

<comment><USER16> Hmm, I also have an extreme lack of patience for other adults (I say adults because I have plenty of patience for my kids). I've been working remotely for 4 years now, I wonder if that is why? I don't think I used to be so impatient with other people. Interesting...

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> It is not just remote work either - I've noticed a trend in my work where although I work in an open plan office surrounded by people, my teams are increasingly "global" which means that usually there is 1 team member on their own in each office.

Although I am surrounded by people, since you're not working with these other people, and/or there are desk moves every 3 months or so as teams are growing, you only ever end up with very superficial "friendships"/social interactions. "Hello" "How was your weekend" "Which team are you on?" "I am on this team" etc etc. You're just doing it out of politeness really, then in a month or two they'll move on to another team/office or there will be another desk move and you're back to square one, surrounded by strangers.

It is not unusual for me to go a whole day in an office surrounded by hundreds of coworkers without physically saying anything to anyone apart from "thanks" for holding open the door.

It is extremely isolating.

</comment><comment><USER25> This echoes my current gig to a tee: worked at home for a couple of months, went stir crazy, found an office. For me, the first office space was a hipster cafe type place that was just too freaking noisy. I moved to a Regus office which was ok but Regus were awful so a few of us clubbed together and got a truly shared office with both closed and open spaces for different type of work. I can highly recommend this setup as some days you just need to hole yourself up in a private enclosed office to do brain work. However the open space promotes social interaction and feeds the soul.

<comment><USER26> +1 to the comments about Regus. While some of the spaces are really well designed & in perfect locations, their billing systems were so broken that I got out of my contract as fast as I could. They couldn't even charge credit cards automatically each month, and they accidentally leaked their entire Australian client list in the To line of an email (then tried to fix it by using the Outlook "Recall This Message" feature).

[Since then I've opted to work from cafes, shopping malls that have started encouraging laptop workers, and a 'coworking' space I found that was mostly empty.]

<comment><USER25> I was on that email list. I was absolutrly livid. They also double charged me $2k+ twice. Will never work there again. What's your tips on Cafe's (if you are in Sydney)?

<comment><USER26> Alas I'm in Perth, and I have terrible taste in coffee... I mostly work at Starbucks whenever I can. (Or Gloria Jeans, since we don't have Starbucks in Perth.) It's a while since I was last in Sydney.

If you're ever in Singapore I can recommend the 100th Starbucks in the financial district (at The Fullerton Waterboat House). Large space with lots of windows, a great view and not very busy. Terrible WiFi though, so tether to a cheap Singaporean 15GB SIM.

<comment><USER25> Thanks for the tips! Appreciate your time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I've been working remote now for 5 years. All from home (sometimes from a car or a cabin). It takes discipline and limits. In my case - limiting my urges to finish out a project or get a bit further at 2am. It can be a blessing and a curse. I'm getting ready to 'venture out' \- spend time at coffee shop or coworking. For the record, I've been 'remote' in many roles; employee and consultant. Overall, for me, I find routine an absolute necessecity to get work done. By routine, I mean 'get dressed as if going into the office' \- it's about mindset.

</comment><comment><USER15> I love working at home. Not going out of my house for weeks on end doesn't bother me at all, and I'm much more productive when I'm working on my own. I think I could be quite happy as a shut-in. I can see how the lack of a social life would bother some people though. I guess the success of working remotely depends a lot on your emotional needs and personality.

On another note, I do have to disagree with the author with regards to making the most money in either New York or the Bay Area. Perhaps the salary looks bigger on its own, but when you consider housing costs, food, gas, taxes, and other costs of living, you actually end up making a lot less than you do in other locations. I've received multiple offers from the Bay Area, and one or two from New York, but they just can't compete, all things considered. Plus, I don't have any desire to cram my family into a 1,000 square-foot cubbyhole, when we can enjoy seven times the space elsewhere for half the price.

</comment><comment><USER28> Getting a girlfriend who also works at home may be hard, but it can fix most of this problem. I liked working while my girlfriend was working at the same time...with some fun interruptions.

<comment><USER29> The funny part is, I have this, and it's fun to joke about, but we never actually do anything. I'm too busy in my world of meetings/development etc to even desire sexy times. I just want to get the next bug fixed.

<comment><USER30> Well. It's fine as far as you're both on the same page all the time.

Being 24/7 with the same person can get really tough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> My company is 100% remote. And I recall very clearly in the interview process one of the most important traits to succeed - Be self-aware.

Everyone is different. Every new remote worker figures out what they need to do to make it work for themselves. And we do not all do the same things. But we all know ourselves well enough to try things, see how it works for ourselves, and figure out what changes we need to make it work. Of course, we also talk to each other, give suggestions, etc. But ultimately, to succeed on your own, you have to proactively care for your own mental health. And self- awareness is vital to doing so.

<comment><USER32> What company is it? I am making a list of remote jobs that I can apply to.

<comment><USER33> I'm not OP, but check out workremotely.io

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Living abroad I've gone the remote road since 2009. I went through a lot of this same stuff but never associated it with my being remote/working from home, though now looking back I can see it most likely did. My health and mood increased once I started to force myself out to socialize more and once we had our children - the household is always busy and full of noise and life now, versus before when my wife went off to work and I sat alone in a quiet apartment all day long. Since the birth of our second I've been doing my first sprint in any nearby coffee shop each morning and that has improved my mood and productivity even further. I've been toying with the idea of a co-working space and this article has convinced me to give it a go.

We are social creatures, to varying degrees, and if we limit out interaction with others too severely, I think it makes it too easy to look exclusively and excessively inward. I'm all about self-analysis and looking inward but there comes a point when you go too far and it's no longer about reflection but a feedback loop of anxiety/fear/self-doubt... at least that has been the case in my experience! Also, regular exercise (running, lifting) has always helped me out of these emotional funks.

</comment><comment><USER35> Great post. The spectrum stuff is very important and it's important to be honest to yourself and during the interview process about what you expect. I now tell every place I interview being on-site all week is not gonna work for me. I need to be remote at least 2 days out of the week to recharge. Otherwise I will burn out in less than 6 months. Most places seem to be ok with that and make concessions to letting me do that.

</comment><comment><USER29> I have a similar issue at the moment. I have tried co-working spaces, but I work with people globally and my day tends to start at 5am. So to get to a co- working space, I'd have to leave at 4:30am, and that's provided they were open (they aren't.)

I've spoke to one about potentially giving me a key to the space, and perhaps that would work, but it's often easier just to roll out of bed, throw on coffee, and start my meetings.

I tend to repeat, and stop going outside much at all, just staying indoors. That then perpetuates my desire to not go outdoors.

It's solvable though, it takes effort on my part to continue experimenting, and trying new things. It only becomes an issue when I just keep repeating the same situation. Definition of insanity, repeating same things, expecting different results.

<comment><AUTHOR> FWIW, the coworking space I like best in my city has 24/7 access for members. This seems to be pretty unusual, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I joined a co-working space this summer and it was...meh. The people were nice and the facility was great, but I don't really see the point unless your employer is going to pickup the tab and/or you have a small apartment with no office or an insufficient one.

I found myself missing my widescreen monitor, standing desk, and chair. The amount of money I've sunk into my home office felt wasted when I used the co- working space.

And the co-working space would swing between eerily quiet or way too much noise. It seemed weird to go (and pay) for a co-working space where everyone is primarily staring at their laptops.

On the other hand, I would maybe consider going from a two bedroom to a one bedroom apartment if I had a full-time 24/7 use of a co-working space and then the cost would more than even out.

<comment><AUTHOR> I spent my last two years at Yelp working from home in Portland, OR, where I'd moved by myself. I started to go completely insane toward the end of my first winter. Being in the same room all day and having nothing ever change around me was much, much worse for my mental health than I had expected - prior to this, I'd never even thought about the concept of my own mental health, but this experience really brought it to the fore.

I tried a couple of coworking spaces, found one that I liked, and have been going there regularly since - my employer paid for my membership at the time, but I quit my job a year ago and it's still worth it to me to have a space where I can go every day to get out of the house and be _around_ humans, even if I don't socialize with them as much as I could.

I've always identified as an introvert, and used to fantasize about the idea of e.g. working in the top room of a lighthouse for a month - assuming you had a good Internet connection, you could get so much coding done there! - but it seems that being around people is much more important than I'd given it credit for, particularly in the winter when it's pitch black outside at 4pm and you're already kind of depressed by default.

<comment><USER37> Working at the top of a lighthouse for a month would be awesome (assuming good Internet) if you were motivated to get something in particular done. I think if you went there with a generalised notion of getting something done, I don't think it would work nearly as well.

_starts looking for lighthouses_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Excellent personal story on finding the right workspace in a remote situation. Home office vs. Coworking space is a conversation I have with other remote works quite a bit, and the answer is different for everyone.

<comment><USER39> >>> Home office vs. Coworking space

I'd recommend a mixture of both, plus visits to coffee shops and libraries, depending on what type of work you need done.

Learning what is effective and finding the right balance can be one of the trickiest elements of WFH.

<comment><USER40> I never understood how anyone can get any productive work done at a coffee shop. The amount of distractions is just too big.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Working remotely for 7 months now. Three things I do not miss are \- neon lights which used to trigger my migraine on a regular basis, \- 45-60 minutes of public transport commute in the heat/cold, \- the need to look busy when the work is already done.

While I did experience a bit of a breakdown at one point, it is something to overcome. I like the "lazy days" of regular work in coffee shops, libraries and sometimes even pubs (no alcohol during work hours though, that's bad on so many levels). When there is heavy need of cognitive abilities, I tend to stay in, start the day with a cold shower, breakfast and coffee, then work at my standing desk.

I find standing desks really something all offices should support for their workforce. It keeps you active during the day and allows for greater focus. Start small, go for what fits your physique. Use a rubber mat. I would suppose it also helps with what the author calls "off-days", since I do not encounter them. There is always something to improve upon. If no hard-work is available, I just work on documentation and learning new skills that advance my work/life/career. This allows me a good night's sleep.

</comment><comment><USER18> I relate closely to this post, especially the position that working remotely is for a certain kind of introvert only.

To such an extent do I relate to it that I wrote a blog post about it a year ago:

[https://likewise.am/2015/12/18/why-i-love-industrious-and- ab...](https://likewise.am/2015/12/18/why-i-love-industrious-and-about- coworking-and-offices-more-generally/)

This post struck a similar note:

Working from home might genuinely be the ideal environment for those closest to the introvert end of the spectrum, and _I think those are the people who form angelic choirs of blog posts asking if you have met their lord and savior, the Fortress of Infinite Solitude, Home Office Edition. For them, the quiet work environment makes their jobs dramatically more enjoyable. But for me, it was the opposite: I'd gone from management (high social interaction) to software development (lower social interaction), and from working in an office (hundreds of people) to working from home (two cats), and expected that this would all be fine._

<comment><USER42> Am I missing something here? Paying $1000/mo rent for a remote space seems insane. At best, that's 15% of your take-home salary. You're basically forcing yourself to work 15% more than you would without an office.

I'd take the extra 15% of free time over the hit in the "socialness" of my office space. I can get that social fix during that time instead.

<comment><USER18> > Industrious seems nice. It would be a good option if you're a Lawyer or CPA > or something where you need to keep up appearances; i.e. clients physically > coming in and talking to you.

I don't know that Industrious is the right place for a lawyer or CPA. Maybe a rather nontraditional one. But I would expect someone like that to prefer traditional "Class A" office space a la Regus.

> However, as a software engineer, it seems like the only benefit is social. > And with that, from a financial standpoint, it doesn't make much sense to > me. You're basically paying to work.

Well, if you buy the premise of the articles—both the parent and mine—then that benefit has value. It has a lot of value to certain kinds of people. By the sound of it, you do not have such high psychological needs. :-)

I didn't talk about it in my article, but the OP did in his: getting one's social fix outside of work isn't that easy, particularly if it's work-related socialisation that is the deficiency you're trying to address.

Having said that, even Industrious doesn't magically fix certain existential problems. For instance, I'm in VoIP, so I have relatively little to discuss or collaborate on with the usual array of people who commonly inhabit such places: SEO/web marketing firms, web developers, miscellaneous ad and marketing agencies, etc.

Industrious had less of these than the typical coworking space, and the tenants of that nature who were there were less obnoxious, but still: being in an exotic and highly technical niche removes a lot of the benefits of shared work culture and water cooler talk, the ability to bounce ideas off officemates or answer their questions, etc.

edit: $1000/mo is pretty steep for a one-person office. Industrious didn't charge me quite that much. But it was pretty up there.

<comment><USER42> Whoops. I probably should have proofread my comment before submitting. Your response seems almost nonsensical now that I've butchered my original post D: Sorry about that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> This mirrors my experience going from product support to software engineering. I moved roles in a company that was primarily a sales organization, so I still had a lot of responsibilities to other people that required social interaction. When I switched companies to join a product development team all the social interaction went away. In fact, earlier this year I went for several months without any real interaction with my co-workers, and I work in a cubicle farm. This had a severe impact on my mental health, to the extent that I'm in therapy now. I've since started seeking more interaction with co- workers during the day because I actually need it to work effectively.

People often write about software development as if it's a solitary activity, but I can only do my best work for other people. Having personal relationships with my co-workers makes me a stronger developer, and I can't do it remotely.

</comment><comment><USER44> As a remote worker myself, I can definitely resonate with the dark sides of working remotely as described in this article. The lifestyle is mostly portrayed as living the dream, however the lack of social interaction and finding a proper work-life balance where you also set time aside for friends, exercise, or meditation for example, is pretty difficult. That's actually what gave me the idea to bring together a community of remote workers to work, live, and travel the world together where the hassle of accommodation, flights, work spaces, gym passes, and social activities are taken care of so remote workers can enjoy the remote lifestyle to the fullest. If anyone's interested you can find more info here [http://www.theremotetrip.com](http://www.theremotetrip.com)

</comment><comment><USER45> How many found new project ideas and partners in coworking spaces ?

</comment><comment><USER46> For my job(s) the last 8 years or so, I've had a mix of on-site (10%), travel (40%) and work-from-home (the remainder). There have been very long stretches when I'm neither in the office, nor travelling to meet with customers, however -- sometimes, months. From my standpoint, I can commiserate with the author here. I live out in the hinterlands with my wife and 6 kids, so there's no shortage of social interaction -- however if I've been stuck here for 6 weeks, I begin to get a little stir crazy. I "recharge" by going to trade shows/events/meetups in NYC (which is about an hour and a half away) -- the energy of the city is refreshing, but I wouldn't want to put up with it every day. Just once in a while...

</comment><comment><USER47> I have tried coworking in both co-rented offices and "office hotels" as well as work from home. For a long while I had a (pretty expensive) seat at a coworking space that I _didn 't_ use, but just knowing that I could leave my isolation at home and go there meant it felt less isolated.

I wish I could work in cafes, at friends etc, but I just _can not_ bring myself to work without a proper big screen and keyboard, which means most nomadic coffee shop setups are off limits. One day working off my laoptop and my neck, eyes and and back hurts. I need a proper desk, which makes it a lot harder to move around.

</comment><comment><USER48> > _But for me, it was the opposite: I'd gone from management (high social > interaction) to software development (lower social interaction), and from > working in an office (hundreds of people) to working from home (two cats), > and expected that this would all be fine._

Could be the change from bossing people around (being a manager) to being bossed around (being a dev)? Because all the rest (interaction with friends, walks, going to the gym etc) one could still have from working remotely -- like the author says they did for the first months anyway.

</comment><comment><USER49> What I like about working from home with regards to socializing is that I get to choose when, where and with whom I socialize. I didn't have that control in an office setting. While most of my clients and colleagues are in other cities, I make sure that I have several local if for no other reason than to have some professional socialization opportunities. And of course there are a dozen groups that I could choose to participate in - actually more than I'd ever have time to do.

</comment><comment><USER50> It's great to see a lot of agreement on this.

I agree with most of it.

Short commutes + some privacy at work would probably entice most people in.

Having 1-2 days a week at the office would be grand.

Being able to focus for long periods without interruption is quite important, frankly, I have no idea how software gets written in those cramped open workspaces with all the noise etc..

Granted, different types of software for different types of things.

I can imagine a deeply technical problem requiring more thought than say a lot of dev-ops, scripting, code reviews, bug fixing, etc. etc..

</comment><comment><USER51> feeling isolated is not a good thing most of the people, that's why libraries, coworking spaces and meetups exist. After all, the human being is a social animal. But what we can do to prevent this is planning where to work from, where to go, analyzing if working remotely is good or not for us. I found this piece of content really helpful as I'm tired to read how nice is to be a digital nomad, well... it is if you're an outgoing person, or if you're the type of guy who likes to feel pushed to always go the extra mile. But we have to prevent people from just going to the middle of nowhere expecting amazing things will happen as you have to be the one who moves first. Loved this!

</comment><comment><USER52> Does anyone know of a valid study of how workgroup size, the ratio of meetings to individual working time, etc. compared to well-organized remote work? By well organized, I mean designed to mitigate the problems cited in this article and otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER53> What's an "off day"?

<comment><USER54> A day when you don't feel like you're being productive, even though you're trying to get something done. One of my coworkers wrote a good article ([https://medium.com/@jdan/quantifying-my-off- days-27e85f5bc15...](https://medium.com/@jdan/quantifying-my-off- days-27e85f5bc157#.r59f6hnrd)) about that, linking it to pomodoro techniques.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> I feel like an alien for my lack of social needs.

</comment><comment><USER56> "Off days"

[https://youtu.be/co_DNpTMKXk](https://youtu.be/co_DNpTMKXk)

</comment><comment><USER57> I like my coworking spaces like I like my haircuts; effective with nobody talking to me.

</comment><comment><USER58> site is down

<comment><USER54> Fixed. New server and I forgot to run the playbook to up the ulimit to prod levels once I swapped it into the pool.

<comment><USER59> Very responsive. Instant load times on my machine. Well done.</comment></comment></comment>